R help - Feb 2007 - Fwd: How to do GAM

I have to evaluate how 4 different environmental variables could be use to
explain the variability on the abundance of an specific species of
zooplankton. I know that Generalized additive models are useful tools to
evaluate this kind of relationships.

1) I want to know the difference to use the "gam" or the
"mgvc" package.
2) The model selection is done with the same comands is I use the mgc
package?
3) How I evaluate the significance of the smooth and the parametric terms of
the model?


Thank you,

Dacha

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